Bioinformatics Software ‘Geno Cluster’ Launched

The Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences, Shri Kapil Sibal launched the GENO-CLUSTER, a bioinformatics software developed jointly by the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology and Jalaja Technologies under the New Millennium Indian Technology Leadership Initiative (NMITLI) programme.

Speaking on the occasion, Shri Sibal said that NMITLI is the largest public-private-partnership R&D initiative of the Govt. of India. In a short span of time, the programme has several significant achievements to its credit. These include the TB molecule, herbal formulations for Psoriasis, low cost computer, weather forecast system, Bio-informatics products etc, with GENO-CLUSTER being one of them.

The Minister said that the NMITLI programme is poised to charter new territories. It would not only build on innovation driven technology niches for economic and industrial development of the country but also to explore and develop newer models for innovation development

The GENO-CLUSTER is a suite of high-end software applications based on concepts, which are fundamental to comparative genomics. The tools primarily aim to predict genes, protein functionality and virulence factors and work in tandem to provide a platform conducive to cutting edge research in the in-silico design of novel drug molecules and vaccines. The highly sophisticated Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are employed to identify genes/non genes/virulent factors. The high accuracy of the results emphasizes the success of the machine learning and statistical biology concepts. The software package includes a number of stand-alone software tools namely, Gene 'D'cfer, Proteome calkulator and Seapath as well as PL-HoSTFA developed by IGIB independently.

Shri Sibal also released a compendium entitled Contributions of CSIR to Antarctic Research: Collected Reprints consisting of published papers from national & international SCI journals pertaining to scientific work carried out by CSIR scientists. The compendium provides a comprehensive view of the work carried out by CSIR scientists for the last 25 years in Antarctic research.

Source : Press Information Bureau
Date : September 27, 2006